


Humidity

by RurouniHime



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Angst, Break Up, M/M, Pining, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-22
Updated: 2011-07-22
Packaged: 2017-10-21 15:48:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/226889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's damn hot. The desert has climbed right into the city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Humidity

**Author's Note:**

> In short, spoilers for Seasons 7 and 8. *****Spoiler specifics in the end notes*** READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!**
> 
> ***Now with Spanish translation by edelau! [**Humedad**](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8790730/chapters/20152417?view_adult=true)

**Humidity**

 

"So it's over, then." Nick's arms are crossed, his stance set shoulder-width, and his eyes have that squinted look that tells of perfect, weighty sobriety.

Greg inhales and drops his gaze to their shoes. Shifts his weight because his arms are crossed, too. It's damn hot. The desert has climbed right into the city, and he can feel the sweat in the bends of his elbows. "It has to be."

Nick's nod is slow in coming, but it arrives. Greg speaks on, using his hands to talk now because there is a frenzy creeping in, a need to be hard and truthful, understood. "I don't want to change shifts. I know _you_ don't."

Nick offers no objections.

"Let's face it, Nick. You work best with Catherine and Grissom, and with Warrick."

"And with you," Nick adds, looking right at him with his lips in an unreadable purse.

Greg nods belatedly. "And with me."

Because it's true. Because he wants it to be true.

**

The sun swelters all week, leaping off into summer with the damp still clinging to its heels. Greg switches out his long sleeves for collared shirts and work-appropriate tees. In the evenings, he wakes up with his throat snapped tight because he's forgotten how his own alarm blares. Nick's was soft, a gradual rise, tuned to jazz.

During shift, he's paired with Nick under Catherine's attentive eye. He works on paint scrapings and blood drops, dazed in the hanging heat from the day before, and at the end of the night, Greg's nerves fire too fast and he scrambles through his notes with shaking fingers. When he finds no error— everything immaculate, professional, and coherent— he is beyond relief. He thanks god for this ability to function without thought, counts his blessings, and heads home as the sun breaks the horizon, already half asleep.

**

Sex with Nick is like driving with Nick. Greg does not peer into the rearview mirror when Nick is behind the wheel, checking for cars in the blind spot, nor does his foot twitch on an imaginary brake as his father's did when Greg had his learner's permit. Nick is an assertive driver, cautious when it matters, and above all, well-versed in protocol.

He sees a stop sign, he stops.

Greg remembers daylight behind dark curtains. He remembers saying _Nicky_ under his breath. He remembers not being able to breathe, a delicious, tight feeling in his chest. He remembers sitting on that edge and _feeling_ , just like that, feeling everything like it's bursting over his flesh and through his innards, up into his blood and right back out through his skin again. He remembers Nick's laugh, robust and full, like Nick's drawl, like Nick's mouth, like the snap deep in Greg's belly when he comes, when Nick kisses the corner of his lips and asks, _Alright?_

_Alright?_

Nick never drinks and drives. Nick does not take the late turns or the yellow lights, and Greg wears his seatbelt because Nick won't drive if he doesn't wear it, not because Greg fears a crash, a roll, a death.

_Nicky._

Sex with Nick _was_ like driving with Nick.

**

Greg comes out of Hodges' lab on Friday, carrying news bad enough to start a tic in his jaw, blood from a third individual after nothing, nothing else at all— and watches Nick take a phone call with a smile that stops his stride in the middle of the corridor. Nick's shoulders lift; he laughs. And then Greg can't see it anymore, because Nick turns when he talks, milling in a circle like a school boy chatting to his sweetheart, fingers curled around the phone, voice low, but not low enough.

"Yeah," Nick says. "Yeah. Right, at six. If you're sure it's not too— Yeah."

Finishes the call with, "Breakfast sounds great."

Greg remembers Nick's eyes on him on Wednesday, on Tuesday. Watching. No words, only Nick, standing away and just… Greg could feel it.

He wishes— traitorous— that he had turned and looked back.

The rest of the day is filled with frustration at just about everything. When he goes home, he can't remember much more than the endless drag of hours. The detail is lost, all but the sound of Nick's laugh when he turned his back.

**

Greg stares at the ceiling and feels like a cliché. Six o'clock has come and gone. The air conditioner clicks on, forcing dead air into movement. His cell slumbers beside the clock, and the red, square-ish digits reflect off its blank screen.

He could call. See if Nick went home.

When the clock clicks to _8:00 AM_ , Greg rolls over. Sighs. Gets up and opens the blinds, and leaves his cell where it is.

**

Sara invites Greg to lunch on Sunday and sits there sipping her coke and laughing at the tale he spins. Once there was a man whose wife thought aloe with mint was a suitable lubricant. It's true, of course; he wouldn't lie to Sara, and the lab is indeed stranger than fiction. The stories just don't excite him as much as they should.

He wants to ask her if it's been worth it, the changes she's had to make. But he doesn't.

**  
**  
**

The slide of a leg over Nick's and the slip of a foot as it hooks around his ankle stretch vividly at Nick's nerves. He can feel the weight of Greg's hand over his chest, arm loose, fingers pressing. Nick turns his head; his muscles are full of heavy liquid; Greg's hair brushes the tip of his nose. He can't smell Greg, the scent is missing, nothing but cool, clear air until—

He wakes up.

The humidity presses sleep-heat into a invisible mass that drifts through his room. The window is dark like tar and the world is silent. Nick lies in the middle of his bed, one arm flung out, alone.

**

Greg is on three cases in a row with him, and Nick experiences a profound and unexpected lack of distraction. It's heartening, because his job is being done even though he's slept with Greg more than once, more than five times, actually.

Nick lucks out and manages not to get slathered in filthy water while pumping a bilge tank in which a girl has been floating for two days. Grissom is not lucky at all, and it would be funny if Nick's emotions weren't so shot. He feels calm, scraped clean like an empty melon rind. Efficient. Compatible with everything and everyone.

Greg watches Grissom towel himself off, camera in hand, no expression on his face.

Nick showers without lemons after shift, and is pulling on a clean shirt at his locker when it touches down, finally, and he stops, looking down the vacant bench. He's driving home alone. Again, like he has been all week. He shouldn't be. He should… He…

But it isn't so. Not anymore.

Nick remembers how he never sees Sara anymore, pulls on his jeans, and leaves.

**

He lies awake through the day as cars rumble past outside, lawns are mown, and birds chatter.

**

Nick strips his bed, pulls the pillow cases off and piles it all on the floor. Gets fresh bedding from the hallway cabinet and brings it back.

And stands there beside the bed, holding the folded sheets in both hands.

He drops the new sheets on his dresser and slides the pillows back into their old cases. The second one still smells like Greg's hair, a little.

**

"Going out again?"

Nick turns and finds Greg in the locker room doorway. One hand is clenched, the other grips the doorjamb. Nick sees those fingers in another light and looks away.

"Yeah." His phone buzzes. The text message reads, Pick u up out front n 5.

Greg's eyes drift to Nick's phone. His nostrils flare and he stalks to his locker. Jerks it open. "Have fun."

Nick frowns at his back, but Greg does not turn around, and eventually, Nick has no excuse to stay. He heads for the hall, and then Greg's snarl stops his feet.

"Didn't take very long."

Nick spins, furious at any number of things, at himself the most, at Greg second. He feels more alive than he has all week. "Sandy's in town. For fuck's sake."

Greg's mouth works. Nick tries to meet Greg's eyes, but Greg looks down. Away.

Something miserable curls in Nick's chest and remains there, even after he walks out, into the sun.

**

Sandy touches his hand and hands him the cherry from her Shirley Temple. "Here, baby. Cheer up."

Nick rolls the cherry stem between two fingers. He's worn through, he wants to sleep. His sister took a red-eye several nights back and has not recovered. Her conference begins again in an hour, she looks beat, like she could sleep for a full day, and yet, her smile is still as wide as he remembers, her eyes just as intuitive.

Nick pops the cherry into his mouth. "I'm good. Just tired."

Sandy's head shakes, back and forth. Slow. "Liar, liar."

She's highlighted her hair. It looks good on her, and he says so.

"Thanks, Nicky," she chirps, and when she touches his hand, he hears a male voice saying his name, and he starts. She peers at him; the frown mars her forehead.

"Nick. Tell me."

The horrible thing is, Sandy is the one he _can_ tell. When she asks _how are you?_ it's not just another form of hello.

"Just a bad case."

She looks at him. Nick can't meet her gaze.

"You can talk to me, you know," Sandy says.

He does know. It's just that he's nearly convinced himself there's nothing to say. All that effort shouldn't be wasted.

**

He feels eyes on him in the lab. It's as if his body has attuned itself without his knowledge, so that he knows exactly to whom those eyes belong.

**

Nick pulls the front door open and finds Greg on his doorstep in rumpled jeans and a striped button-down with the sleeves open.

"I don't want to do this." Greg's finger stabs out, the sleeve of his shirt riding up and falling back. Nick looks at the retreating hand and then up at the tangle of Greg's hair.

"Greg," is all he says, just a name, nothing meant to come before or after it, but he doubts Greg hears that, because—

"It's been two weeks. I don't—"

"Twelve days," Nick corrects, because the count has been simmering behind his eyelids the entire two hundred and eighty-eight hours. Greg glares at him.

"Nicky, do you want this?" His voice cracks, echoes, and Nick witnesses the glare tumbling into something sad. "Do you want— I don't. I want to say 'fuck Ecklie' and just do it anyway. I had a _good time_ , Nick."

His finger stabs again, and Nick reaches out, catches his wrist faster than Greg can pull back and tugs him in. Just a few feet; Greg stops in front of him, almost in his house, and jerks a hand through his hair.

"Nick?"

"It _was_ a good time," Nick mutters. Greg's eyes shift, trying to read him. Nick feels more energetic than he has felt all fourteen-minus-two days, and not anxious, not cursed with insomnia. "Greg, of course I want you. What did you think, man?"

Greg's hand eludes his with a quick jerk and Nick has the sense that Greg is not darting away as much as he is darting inward. Nick lets his own hand drop and then thinks, _the hell with it_ , and rubs his forehead with all five fingers. He spreads both arms, palms up.

"I haven't been sleeping, Greggo." He shakes his head. Greg stares at him as if he's watching information click into place, DNA links, crooked bullets, tox readouts. Nick exhales, irritated at a thing he can't put his finger on. "I'm wiped out and I am no fan of Ecklie's. What does that mean to you?"

Greg steps forward too quickly for Nick to react, grabs the nape of his neck and brings their mouths together. He savors Nick's bottom lip for a hot, raw instant before pulling back.

"I'm not having sex with you," Greg whispers breathlessly. Nick feels the words against his lips in little puffs. Fingers affirm their hold at his nape. "Not just sex. That isn't what this is. I mean—"

"Greg." Nick grabs Greg's other hand, squeezing him into silence, pulling him right up against his chest. "I know. We already did that."

Greg nods, a little frantically. His eyes are wide; he looks almost scared. Nick kisses him and it's open and formless, not really a kiss at all, not like any Nick has ever initiated.

Greg returns it.

Not one night. Certainly not fourteen minus two. Greg doesn't stand for teasing anymore, he's too _old_ now, the age is in his eyes… and Nick has never been cruel enough to himself to wreck his own happiness. The job does that often enough for both of them, and this, _this_ , weighs as much as a decade's age difference, maybe more. It has a lot of holes that they've both filled with painful things. Greg's mouth moves along his jaw, a very soft, very tender kiss there, right where Nick's pulse beats. Nick turns, feeling his face heat, until he can smell Greg's hair, and Greg sighs, goes limp with his head on Nick's shoulder. His fingers stroke down the back of Nick's neck once.

Nick is so fucking tired, just like that. He folds himself up almost without knowing it, and Greg's arm slinks around to hold him upright, as if he knew before Nick did.

"I'm staying." Greg's murmur sounds at his ear. "Okay?"

Nick heaves a huge sigh and tightens his arms around Greg's body, already thinking of pillows and warm, silent darkness. "Course you're staying, Sanders."

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: This takes place right after Season 8, Ep 2, "Ala Cart", and deals with the fallout of the discovery of Grissom and Sara's relationship. I've always wondered what that discovery would do to any other relationships that existed at the time.


End file.
